The Necessity of a Glorious Church Part 3

I feel I need to clarify a few things before I continue on in my argument. First is that most of what I am writing, I have been thinking through for quite some time, but that doesn’t not necessarily mean that I have the entire argument or picture in view at any one point. There is probably much that I intend to say that I’m not, and much that I don’t intent that can easily be read into what I’m saying.

Second, I tend to talk largely in absolutes. Whether that is a bad thing is up to you, but I tend to be slightly more open-minded than I probably come across.

So I start this post official with a bit of a story. As I stood in New Life Church one Sunday morning earlier this semester, I was struck with a picture in my head. I can’t remember if it was during worship or during the sermon, but I do know that it was more vivid than most of the random things that pop into my head. Some might say it was a vision, and others might think that is weird, so to keep it user friendly, I’ll call it a simple mental image.

The picture was that of evangelism. There were two people, the evangelist and the one being evangelized to. The scene was dark, as if the two men were suspended in a void, yet the men were perfectly visible. The evangelist obviously knew all the right words to say, I could literally see them coming out of his mouth, as if a ticker tape with the words was being sent through the air to the other man. The argument was the equivalent of what you’d see on a tract or the bridge diagram. Jesus loves you, died for you, all the Christian jargon.

The problem was that there was some sort of fog between the two people. As the words entered the fog, I could see the mist laying hold of the words, almost like a man trying to make his way through a dense jungle without a machete. Only a few words actually made it out of the fog, enough for the second man to grab onto a few of them, like Jesus and salvation, and a few other broken words. Enough for the man to understand the basic message, but not quite enough to move past the confusion of the fog.

Then the scene rest, the two men and the fog were still present. This time, the evangelist reached out his hand, as if to lay hands on the man to pray for him. Out of the darkness surrounding the men came flying in white arrows from all directions. The arrows lit up the second man, the fog dissipated, and the image ended.

I instantly knew what the whole picture meant. The first scenario was about the current model of evangelism that is dominant in most churches today; the intellectual approach. In it, we try to convince the world through logic that Jesus is lord and savior. We have all sorts of plausible arguments, logic puzzles, and snazzy diagrams explaining the cross, salvation, and love.

As I spoke about in the first post, the lack of a changed lifestyle for most Christians leaves little room to legitimize ourselves within the culture on a whole. We therefore rely upon emotional experience and consumerism to lend credibility to our own conversion experience.

I’d like to now argue that the necessity of the justification of our conversions by these means is contingent upon the means by which we were converted. Our logical approach to evangelism begets logical approaches to understand God.

The problem is, these logical approaches are lacking. We are left to spend years trying to piece together a picture of God by reading endless amounts of books, listening to countless sermons, and arguing about theology on facebook. This in turn creates an industry to support this endless search for God. We have Christian book publishers, Christian movies, and GodTube, our own little version of youtube.

So we get caught in this cycle caused by broken evangelism, trying to grab the missing words from the mist.

But I would like to propose that the gospel was never meant to make sense. It was never meant to be a logical assertion to be assented to. It was never meant to be preaches exclusively with words.

(This coming from a guy who spends most, if not all, of his time pondering, creating theories in his head, and trying to debunk arguments. I’ve spent the last two and a half years trying to create an understanding of God using logic. I bring this up only to say that what I am writing now is as much of a critique of my own life as it is of Christianity as a whole.)

As I spoke rather vaguely of in the last post, preaching the gospel of the kingdom and seeing the miraculous is intimately connected. Multiple times in Matthew, Jesus is said to be preaching the gospel, and healing every sickness and disease. Jesus even sends his disciples out to do the same in Mat 10.

In 1 Cor 2, Paul talks of his evangelism in Corinth. He says, “my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”

The word “power” is \doo'-nam-is\, which comes from the same root as our modern word dynamite.

Our gospel should be explosive.

Two chapters later, Paul is speaking about some arrogant men in the church and he says that when he returns to them, he won’t judge the men by what they are boasting about, but by the power that they demonstrate.

1 Cor 4:20 ‘For the kingdom of God does not consist of talk, but in power.”

Again to the Corinthians, though in his second letter, Paul talks about the glory of God. He speaks of Moses’ shining face after Moses descends from the mountain. Moses just had an encounter with the Lord, and now his face is literally glowing so brightly that the Israelites make him wear a vale over his face, as to hide themselves from the glory of the Lord.

Paul says, ”For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, the ministry of righteousness must far exceed it in glory.” (2 Cor 3:9)

If there is glory in the Law, then how much more glory should there be on display from the believers in the new covenant?

2 Cor 3:10 “Indeed, in this case, what once had glory has come to have no glory at all, because of the glory that surpasses it.”

Have you ever look directly at a flashlight in the dark? It is blindingly bright.

Have you ever looked at a flashlight in broad daylight? You can hardly tell that it is on.

The glory manifested in our lives should be like the sun, compared to the flashlight of the Old Testament.

But what does that mean?

In the Old Testament, God’s glory was understood to be a physical manifestation. It filled the temple. The psalmist’s heart and fleshed ached to return to the weighty presence of the Lord.

And it is just that, a weighty presence. The Hebrew word for glory is the same word as heavy. It is a physical manifestation of weight.

The glory also manifested as a cloud and fire in the desert to lead Israel.

Have you ever lain in bed at night under a warm blanket heavy on your chest? There are few more comforting feelings than that. I imagine God’s weighty presence to be like that, only far, far, far superior.

In Isaiah, and other prophetic writings, the call is for the Lord’s weighty presence to fill the whole earth. For his glory to cover the lands as water covers the seas.

Paul proclaims that the glory of our time should make the glory in the Old Testament not only pale in comparison, but it shouldn’t even be in the same conversation. We shouldn’t be speaking of the great triumphs in the old days, as if God doesn’t intend to move even greater in our lifetime.

Jesus says in John 14 that we will do greater works than he ever did.

We are called to do greater works than Jesus.

The one who has all authority on heaven and on earth is calling us to do greater works than he ever did.

We are called to disciple nations.

To preach the gospel to the ends of the earth.

The gospel, that when preached causes lame people to stand and dead people to raise up, that when mentioned is surely to be followed by a miracle of some sort.

We are called to preach this gospel to all peoples. Not to logic them into heaven, but to bring heaven to them.

To bring heaven to earth.

To be a people of his glory, of his weighty presence.

A people with faces shining brighter than the sun because we’ve seen Jesus.

And there in lies the problem. How are we to tell others of a God we’ve never actually met, of a God we know only through diagrams and sermons?

How are we supposed to live in His glory?

I’m not entirely sure, but it is my most earnest prayer that we find out. That as you are reading this, God will send his glory upon you. That you will be struck with weighty presence.

And that we’ll be able to introduce the world to a God that we’ve met, face to face, as friends, as lovers.

May His glory cover the earth, as water covers the sea.